From day one, the founding premise of the LO project has involved growing a team of Lakewood volunteers dedicated to the production of a hyper-local publication in newsprint form and advancing civic dialogue in a real name on-line forum.
By its very nature a hyper-local publication will drip sentiment, symbolism and subjectivity more so than alienation, objectivity and skepticism, which customarily inform the traditional practice of journalism.
Production of a hyper-local publication hinges on wide-spread participant-observer engagement.
There is also a communal spirit to the LO project, one that allows some of us to profess against the grain of cynicism that human life in Lakewood makes a sacred settlement. Again, I fully realize there are irrational, mythological and symbolic dimensions to the space of interaction and publication that the LO advances, and that these zones diverge substantially from the traditional practice of journalism.
The qualitative and subjective contents any engaged citizen brings to the light and heat of the LO project are valued as richly or as cheaply as quantitative and objective claims spun through the standard professional lens.
The LO’s insistence on the subjective side of community life amplified in newsprint is a profoundly radical and disturbing stance. To be sure, it's objectionable to some.
From time to time, as these objections are stated, there is need, I believe, to explain the intention, the theory and the practice of the LO’s “post-professional†interactions with civic institutions, community, people, situations, territorial objects and symbols. We do so together for the purpose of knowing the city we inhabit together par excellence.
Out of the box there was a clear understanding that by increasing the production levels of sentiment, symbolism and subjectivity through civic journalism Lakewoodites could mount an eloquent or not-so-eloquent - depending on one’s view and expectations for news – sense of neighborhood belonging.
We believed a spirit of belonging to a good neighborhood whose stories form the core of civic journalism could help in the defense of the territory against outside forces and interests whose culture and financial values diverge from those held by insiders.
Thus the LO is a conceptual tool – human and symbolic – deployed by volunteers in defense of the city and the sacred settlement we inhabit together.
In terms of Urban Studies and Urban Practice the LO project, with its humanistic treatment of the subject matter and symbols of the city, would easily classify in the school termed “Symbolic Interactionist.†(See Jerome Krase - Self and Community in the City
http://www.brooklynsoc.org/PLG/selfandc ... ch1-1.html)
Hence, the bias for culturally and historically positive narratives stems from the subjective arousal of citizens inspired to transform themselves while preserving and protecting neighborhoods, institutions and traditions in our city.
That we are doing so at an historical moment when decay from the Cleveland Necropolis is festering in our midst makes the LO project all the more compelling and significant.
And again, that means the LO project will perforce drip with all the sentiment, symbolism and subjectivity that such heightened interaction can possibly deliver. These drippings are not to everyone’s taste, of course. Nor should they be. And that is O.K.
However, there is nothing to stop someone from supplying objective, scientific, sophisticated reports. Just don’t expect anyone else to do the job, but yourself. That LO project is just that inclusive.
Smart people on the LO Deck read everything with a grain of salt, and most especially those ‘professional’ productions that confront the local scene while repressing in the name of objectivity those subjective and symbolic dimensions of estrangement from the ground of civic life to which we all belong.
Kenneth Warren
